I'm bored...so let's disclose more PJ

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Yang Sei Fu
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I'm bored...so let's disclose more PJ

#1 Post by Yang Sei Fu »

This is technically bad for me...but here goes:
Presenting the rough sketches of Jesi *bonk* err I mean...
Zakary Hawk!

http://cwds.hp.infoseek.co.jp/pics/yuki2sketch.png
http://cwds.hp.infoseek.co.jp/pics/taka2sketch.png
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#2 Post by Megaman Z »

Okaaay... must be some inside joke on the post I don't know, but as far as the artwork, looks good so far. (bear in mind that this is relative to what else I have seen from an artist as well as what I have seen elsewhere...)
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#3 Post by chronoluminaire »

The girl isn't in a style that particularly appeals to me. (Although she's still far far better than I could draw!) But the guy is very cool, both face and chibi with staple-gun XD

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#4 Post by PyTom »

In general, I like the style of the artist formerly known as Jesi.

Two issues, both with ears. The girl's ear is a bit high on her head, which looks unnatural. The guy's ear is in the right place, but the earlobe doesn't seem to be attached to the head. (There's a line separating the ear from the head.) With the earring, it almost seems like his ear is nailed on. :wink:

Although methods always matter, I think that most likely the designs will need to change a little before they can be colored, especially if a digital process is to be used for coloring.

I love the general layout of the faces, and the hair. The clothing designs are also quite nice, and I like the chibi version of Yuki.

Hm... These figures are basically busts from the shoulders up. Have you decided how much of the characters will be shown during the basic interactions? (Like thighs-up, waist-up, shoulders-up, etc.)

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#5 Post by Yang Sei Fu »

Raw art for the tachi-e (stand-up drawings) are full body, but in-game use are anywhere from waist to ankles up, depending on the person's height. The game will be representing them in height-relation.

And yes, I'll make Arthur colour these in...I've been talking with him about this several times already...we'll see about the refinement of the drawings. The lines will definitely be reinforced and refined by Arthur before colouring.
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#6 Post by RedSlash »

I like the guy. The chibi sketches are cool too. You might want to lower the resolution on the picts as they appear a little too big on my screen.

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#7 Post by mikey »

Sketches are cool, but what would really put some action into it would be something playable - or perhaps a screenshot of real in-game art of the sketched characters (now don't tell me that there are none), or backgrounds. I always wanted to see how PJ looks now - what the progress is since last year's May demo and so on. Do you have a working version already?

So, if it's not a secret, can you tell us the
- word count
- character cuont
- BG count
of your project? Even estimates are fine. I'd like to know, because frankly, it's hard to track the progress the game has made.

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#8 Post by Yang Sei Fu »

Keep in mind that since the May demo from last year, PJ had to restart itself to restructure a few things. Literally.
The old design was good, but still had a few inefficient patterns. There are still a few organizational bugs today, but at least we have a decent BG artist.

Currently, I have about 15,000 words in the English version up to Chapter 3-1 (as to 23,230 words in the Chinese to the same point), and that's only the main line from the book - not counting the branched route. The book's majority of development will happen during 3-1 through 4-4.

The chapter numbering system is going to be a little strange to people without the table of contents of my novel. Here is an overview. Number in brackets is the word count of the Chinese unedited version.
Chapter 1, 2: 4 sections each (19,649 combined)
Chapter 3, 4: 3 sections each (32,130 combined)
Chapter 5: 2 sections (11,127 combined with epilogue)

The demo will introduce the main character's 4-people nuclear family, as well 2 other adults (2, or 4? Schedule tentative) and 3 other children.

Beyond the demo, there's another adult to count. Side characters such as a Gr.2 reading buddy, the teacher etc. are not drawn.

BG count...so far we have 2 drawn, but total count for Book 1 (Phase I) is:
5 for the main character's house (not counting variations)
2 for residential area streets
4 for the Ogasawara household
4 for the school (1 extra scene in event CG only)
2 for the shopping district street
1 for the commerce tower mall (music store, optician)
2 for the airport and the Italian restaurant
-----------------------------
20 BGs in the totality of Book 1 (basically 3 times the size of the demo)
Event CG count will remain undisclosed for now (depending how how much and fast we can work, I determine what gets the special event first), but expect an average of 1 to 2 CGs from each section.
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Game Engine progress

#9 Post by esperknight »

Since Jon there can't talk about the engine, I will :) So far, engine has full support of the script concerning music, sfx, text, characters, backgrounds and the main stuff. Comeing is saving/loading, etc. Effects, are fade in, transitions left right, right left, up down, down up, more to come :) Have to say this one is a lot better than the last, since one, I have no worries about it sapping memory since that was a problem with visual basics use of alpha blending, plus, I'm being meticolous with my code and making sure everythign works together. Also so far included I should say, full intro, menus for start of game, also can right click make text dissapear, and also text skipping (fast = left ctrl, right ctrl, and enter) (slow = hold down the mouse). I intend for this engine to be very full featured while being ease of use, may be released to the general public in a while, dunno. So far the only other game to use this is Taileweaver for his game "Foxtaile". I have to say, for me being a decent beginner in C (well I was... maybe a novice now), its going pretty well. Also, scripts are based on an html like syntax thought up by Jon. All in all, I'm quite happy with the progress I have made, and have to say.... Visual Basic sucks as a game engine (less they fixed the memory leak in alpha blending/blitting).

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Re: Game Engine progress

#10 Post by PyTom »

esperknight wrote: Also so far included I should say, full intro, menus for start of game, also can right click make text dissapear, and also text skipping (fast = left ctrl, right ctrl, and enter) (slow = hold down the mouse).
Some thoughts on bindings: I think center click is usually used to hide the text on the screen, with right-click being used to access the load-save menu, or some other menu that helps control the game.

Fast text skipping is usually done with the CTRL keys. Enter is usually bound to make menu choices and dismiss dialogue. Space is sometimes used to hide the text, but I like it better when space is bound to dismiss, as the space bar is usually the biggest key on the keyboard, and therefore the easiest one to hit repeatedly.

I think you'll get some user dislike of slow skip being holding down the mouse button. I've had users report that they like to read text while holding down the mouse button.

Anyway, these are just some comments on your keybindings. I think it's important that we at least make an attempt to standardize key and mouse bindings between engines, as such standardization will help the user experience, by minimizing the learning curve for each new game.

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#11 Post by Grey »

I think I've played more games that have right click as hide than centre click. If I had to guess a button to call up a menu I'd probably press Esc.

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#12 Post by RedSlash »

My personal preferences would be right-click menu, middle-click hide text, space-bar advance text. But maybe that might be hard for people with 2 or 1 button mouses so you should map those to keyboard as well. I'd prob use, ESC for menu and TAB for text hiding, but thats just a personal preference.

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#13 Post by Taleweaver »

As for the engine, as much as I've seen of it looks rather neat and bugless (so far), and I'm really looking forward to seeing "Foxtaile" made with it. If art and music can be implemented easily and it all becomes as user-friendly as possible, this will probably be at least as good as Ren'Py.
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#14 Post by papillon »

Hrm, center click to hide the window is entirely new to me. I'm not sure my programming environment even knows to catch the wheel (Do you have an actual third button? I have right/left/wheel, and while the wheel can be clicked I never use it that way.) I have a special GUI icon for that - as well as for skipping, as having a skip-fast-forward arrow is what I'm used to from games I've played.

I was going to ask a couple people off this board if they were interested in testing duties, but with this month being writing month I suspect everyone is pretty busy right now. :) OTOH, my background artist is being... extremely unproductive, at this rate it could be years before I can release...

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#15 Post by PyTom »

papillon wrote:Hrm, center click to hide the window is entirely new to me. I'm not sure my programming environment even knows to catch the wheel (Do you have an actual third button? I have right/left/wheel, and while the wheel can be clicked I never use it that way.) I have a special GUI icon for that - as well as for skipping, as having a skip-fast-forward arrow is what I'm used to from games I've played.
Normally, clicking the mouse wheel is the same thing as pushing the center mouse button. (I believe that the mouse would send out the same signal in both cases.)

On most environments I've seen, the mouse wheel sends out mouse buttons 4 and 5, but that may just be a unixism.

Does your skip function skip only read messages? I think that that's an important feature for an engine to have. (And "readness" usually persists across sessions.)

Ren'Py does support using icons for doing things like skipping and hiding the screen, but I haven't given a good example of how to use them in practice. I think it's because I'm a text/keyboard oriented kind of guy.

I'm going to start a new thread to discuss keyboard and mouse bindings in, so that we dont's clutter up a thread devoted to PJ.

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